I love the Agatha Christie question!
Who are your HP/Twilight faves in the Christie universe? (Who’s the opportunist who knows too much and dies for it? Who’s the conman killer who courts the girl to avoid suspicion? Who’s just trying to take a holiday and gets caught-up in a murder? Who are the dynamic mystery-solving duo who realize they are in love by the end of the novel? etc.).
I mean, that is kind of what The Man Who Would Be King (and secret fic) (both cowritten with @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin) have already become. We have our murder victim, Alphard, a very rich man with a colorful family, and possibly his sister, we have our unlikely detectives in Voldemort, Lily Potter, and Alphard himself. It may not be the center of the story but it's a large part of it.
In other words my answer for Harry Potter would somehow spoil all my present and future fics so I won't.
As for the Twilight version...
I vote we do it wealthy dysfunctional family style, it's most natural.
A patriarch is poisoned
Carlisle Cullen, a very wealthy man with powerful enemies, nonetheless dear to those around him and blessed with more friends than most, is found dead in his office one morning. Cause of death? Murder.
The police, caught on the detail that Dr. Cullen was a vampire and vampires are real, what the fuck is this on the doctor's autopsy table and is he going to wake up again and drink all our blood?, are little use in the investigation. Scotland Yard is soon brought in, and using Chief Swan's connections with the family they get a better picture of Dr. Cullen's life.
His family wasn't looking to inherit him anytime soon, as he was immortal. None of them were having money troubles however, all were independently wealthy.
He had made enemies of a thousand-year-old clan of powerful vampires, who on hearing that his murder is being investigated like this get very upset. Supposedly the victim lived with them in his youth (and inspector Craddock cries when he learns the timeline for this murder goes back to the 1600s. Are they going to have to bring historians in on this murder??), he might have known something
Oh what's that? The victim had a whole network of friends across the globe, who are all killers, and he knew everyone's secrets? ... do we have the budget to investigate this?
The victim was also living next to a tribe of magical shapeshifting wolves evolved specifically to kill his kind. They liked him best and had a line in their treaty that "he dies last". Not sure what to do with this information
Rosalie Hale missing person case from 1933 solved: Carlisle Cullen adopted her. Was she recognised, did someone piece it together, and was Carlisle killed in retribution?
The victim lived a fake life of fake papers. Could be important, except it's the most normal thing about this case.
The police wonder how this man didn't get murdered sooner, and are stretched so thin the investigation is going slowly.
So, Renesmee gets to be our plucky detective du jour, as she decides to see if she can help. Surely there is no harm in her poking around, and she's well liked around the vampire world so there might be answers she can get that human police can't, partly because policemen keep getting eaten.
She slowly narrows it down to the horrible realization that it was someone in the family, and she learns terrible things.
Jasper Hale wasn't Jasper Hale at all! He was a friend of Jasper's in the newborn army who wanted a new life, and who in the wake of Jasper's suden and unexpected death assumed his identity. He had Peter bite his entire face so he'd be scarred like Jasper had been, and vouch for this blond vampire most definitely being Jasper Hale.
Peter later had to die because he Knew Too Much, and so did Charlotte, regrettably. Fake Jasper did however not kill Carlisle.
Edward seems a prime suspect, he is an angry and resentful young man who acts out. Everyone thinks he did it, and that Bella should certainly marry Jacob, the safer option. Much upheaval is had, however, once Renesmee is able to clear Edward's name and he meaningfully links arms with Bella. They sail off into the sunset with their inheritance.
Rosalie is a beautiful, cold, intimidating woman, the femme fatale sort who's surely conniving. It's a bit of a mystery why she married that poor fool Emmett, but it's clear to all she doesn't love him. No clear motive from her, other than the money she would inherit, but she's just so suspicious. Her alibi is ambiguous, she claims she was with Esme and Emmett but what if Esme and Emmett are lying to protect their daughter and wife? Superintendent Battle wonders about that.
Renesmee is at a loss.
And then she realizes that it's not Rosalie who acts like she doesn't love Emmett, it's Emmett who acts like he doesn't love her! And Esme's grieving widow act is just that, it's an act!
Renesmee realizes that Emmett and Esme are lovers, and killed Carlisle together. Esme committed it while Emmett tricked Rosalie into giving her an alibi. Renesmee realizes this once she has a "But Rosalie couldn't have seen Esme from that angle!" moment.
The plan was too pin Rosalie for the murder, see her hanged, and then in due time the mourning widowers would marry, happily entitled to all the money they couldn't have touched if they'd divorced. Also Rosalie was Catholic so she wouldn't have agreed to a divorce.
The two lovers are confronted, and Esme pulls out a tiny pearl-studded gun from her shoe, says "We tried, my love. I regret nothing" before shooting first Emmett, then herself.
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(Tw for self-harm and abuse)
I just had a really weird ask show up, and instead of airing it (because it implied both that we choose to be gay, and that trans people wouldn't be trans unless we were m*olested as children) I'm gonna talk a bit about my long journey with identity.
Even though I spent a lot of my childhood being pretty confused about myself, I didn't hear the word 'Transgender' until I was an adult in 2009. That year I also got my license suspended for underage drinking and had to move back with my parents for a year. At my parents urging I started going to church activities every week, which is where i met my now ex-wife. I spent 2011 until about 2016 slowly knowing that I was going to come out eventually, but i was doing it all in secret. What I was doing was in pretty stark contrast to my religious upbringing and all the pressure being placed on me to start being a husband, and the huge expectation to have kids.
It culminated in me wearing makeup to my old Home Depot job for about a month, and even though everyone there was pretty ok with it, my parents saw me one day. And the entire situation crashed around me. My parents and my ex let it be known that I was going to stop this forever or I'd be cut off from the family, that I'd be homeless and alone if I continued. They said what I was doing was against God.
And I was so scared I went along with it. Everything fem was thrown away. I shaved my head. I had a kid, even though I had some serious doubts that I would be a good parent. The next 4 years of my life was pretending to be the cis straight man my family wanted me to be.
And it's not a stretch to say that I was dying. I slept 3 hours a day. I went through periods of binge eating and then starving myself. I had a terrible temper. I started working a driving job and every time I got behind the wheel I thought about driving off a cliff. I gave up control of my finances. I let other people decide everything for me. I didn't get pleasure from anything in life at that point, not food or entertainment or even sex. The light was gone from my eyes, hidden behind a big beard and a flannel shirt.
It wasn't until summer 2021 that I couldn't take it anymore. I broke down in front of my ex-wife in a restaurant parking lot while our kid was asleep in the car. It was a 2-day fight where I was called hateful things I've never heard before, by someone who claimed to love me. But eventually she relented. We agreed the relationship between us was functionally over, and I still had an obligation to our son. I started looking for therapy the next day.
All that brings me to now. That ask was sent by an asshole, who doesn't know anything about my life and isn't gonna change their mind based on anything I say. But I do hope there are people who find this and think a little more positively about queer existence. You could say I 'chose to be trans' and you might be right in a way. I was always trans, but I chose to transition. Because the other option was death. I decide my life, not transphobes or my shit family or a shit interpretation of God. Me. Gay people, trans people, all of us *choose* to live in a way that makes us happy. That's it.
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Role model paradox
The problem with the lack/lack of access to inspiring male role models for young boys is that we can’t solve it for them.
It’s like how the health class video about the Evils of Alcohol had everyone at the Wild Teenager Party(TM) dressed as if they were going to church and showed nothing worse than some inconvenience and (maybe) getting in trouble for having a party (offscreen). The educational institution is not going to show anything that could get them angry letters from parents, even if the students are already in high school and at least some of them are already having sex and driving under the influence.
The kind of role model that parents and teachers would choose will probably seem crummy and manipulative to their kids. “Here, look at this sports star (who plays a boring sport and is older than your parents),” “Look at this kid sports star (who’s a complete goody-two-shoes because they wouldn’t put him on TV otherwise),” “Look at this handsome guy (who’s ugly),” or “Look at this historical/fictional figure (who either did everything the grownups told him and/or showed rebellion in a way that seems boring),” “Look at this genuinely good star of a kids’ TV show (that you outgrew two years ago and would get mocked mercilessly by your peers for talking about).”
The kids have to choose whom they admire, and anyone they pick is going to have some traits that the adults in their lives won’t like. They’ll disobey their parents. They’ll speak defiantly to teachers. They’ll skip school/go drinking/etc. and it’ll be shown as clever and good that they got away with it. I remember writing a children’s story as a program project. It was about two girls going hiking in the woods. They get lost and then find their way again. Pretty tame. My mom kept telling me “Have them say ‘we should have taken an adult with us.’” But then there would have been no point. Even Ramona Quimby got to walk to school by herself, make her own sandwiches, and pulled another kid’s hair once.
There was an early-nineties PSA about always wearing a bike helmet starring Michaelangelo the Ninja Turtle. It had clearly been written by someone who’d never seen the cartoon. PSA Mikey was humble and polite. Humble and polite. These writers did NOT understand what it was kids liked about the character.
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